Status Games: Engineering Scarcity in a World of Abundance

An overlooked aspect of product design is that people use products that just make them feel good. But most founders miss it because the mental frameworks that are common in business tend to be more focused on things that are easily measured. 

What emotional payoff does your product have?

During the early days, every product on the Amazom site had a sales rank. And all the authors were competing: “Please, buy my book. I have to move my sales rank up.” . It was a mechanism, made up scarcity. There’s no actual physical constraint time.

It's very important for entrepreneurs when building their products to define what scarcity means on their platform.

There is some hurdle that you have to do in a product to capture status. Product managers should define some unique form of proof of work to build a game around. Restrict the template enough so that an initial group of users can get excited about it and then start to build that network effect:

• Vine came out & said you got 6 seconds — a good restriction to give users; a blank template in which to pour something. But it wasn’t restrictive enough.
• Musical.ly said, “No, we actually want you to use music in the background. And we want you to do a little" That restriction worked better.
• Fiverr - “A marketplace, but everything is $5.”

Not all friction in the product needs to be removed. The friction required to create content on social networks is is a good type of friction. You can not gain a lot of status if the work put in requires no effort. 

eg: Twitter frictionless posting created a very divisive fake-news spreading platform.